BilmBlog500

Here's a letter I sent to several reporters at the Washington Post about the, um, "struggles" of the Trump administration to tell the truth.  Curious when or if anyone will respond... Dear Messrs. Rucker, Hudson, Harris and Dawsey: I am writing about a line from an article of yours from last Tuesday’s paper which i find deeply troubling, which is  "The result is a credibility crisis for an administration that has long struggled to communicate factual information to the public.” Your colleague Margaret Sullivan, whom I am cc’ing, writes frequently about the media’s need to do a better job covering the Trump administration, and this sentence is a poster child for falling short of the mark. I understand the constraints journalists operate under.  I know, as an example, that there are strong legal reasons to use the words “alleged killer” prior to the plea or guilty verdict.  Even when it’s obvious. But I do not believe that the circumlocution you used in last Tuesday’s ...

My nephew tweeted a link to a New York Magazine article explaining why Bernie Sanders is a Bad Thing.  The very liberal NY Times columnist Paul Krugman has a column with similar arguments in the Jan 18 New York Times.  And on one level, I agree with both. Sanders is too bombastically left wing to have any chance of winning. There is just one problem. Hillary's problem putting Bernie away is indicative of the essential problem with Hillary.  She will lose to any Republican who runs, because the closer we get to an actual election the more there will be way too may people who decide they just don't want to have Hillary and all the Clinton baggage in the White House, just like people are doing in the early primary states.  I fear the people complaining about Bernie Sanders don't understand that the alternative is as unelectable, in part because they are part of the establishment, like Hillary has been part of the establishment, and they just don't understand how littl...

One of the things I hate about politics, politicians, and the people who support them is the complete inconsistency of their morality -- i.e., things that are 100% acceptable and which should, must, have to be totally overlooked when your guy does it are 100% wrong and heinous and awful when the other guy does it. A quick example of this:  Could you imagine how the right wing propaganda machine would be humming if a major Democratic figure had been caught outright lying about the funding of their campaign, if some sob story about sacrificing all to run for office turned out to be "Goldman Sachs gave me a loan, and after I knew I'd be getting the loan, I put all my own money into the campaign." That's what Ted Cruz did , and the story's gotten surprisingly little traction. And much as I don't like Ted Cruz, I think everyone should consider him a natural-born citizen eligible to be President of the United State. But at the same time, much as I don't like Don...

Just to get on my high horse again about the ludicrousness of our allowing our government to waste so much money spying on us, bringing it back a little to the business of JABberwocky... We at JABberwocky believe in information.  We rigorously spreadsheet pretty much every piece of royalty statement paperwork that comes our way, in varying detail. Just like the NSA wants to vacuum up information because it may not know until after the fact which e-mails or which phone call metadata it may need at some future point, we can't predict exactly which information we might need at some future point.  Since modern spreadsheets allow information to flow upwards very easily, it just seems better to start out having everything in a nice spreadsheet that can flow up.  The first statement for your hardcover will flow upwards into a summary for the hardcover.  The paperback and e-book will flow upward.  They will merge with the hardcover information to give you the total sale...

Since I still have a land line it is susceptible to getting calls from polling companies. I kind of like this.  It is occasionally interesting because you can tell who's paying for the poll by the kinds of questions being asked and the way they are being phrased.  And who doesn't want to be asked their opinion. But I've got to take a few minutes to complain in public about a call I got yesterday. I was sitting around watching tennis from Roland Garros, so I figured I could watch tennis and be polled at the same time.  And the person taking the poll assures me it's just a few questions and won't go on for very long at all. It turns out to be a poll on the NYC mayor's race.  I'm asked multiple times to choose whom I would vote for today, which I refuse to do.  There are two or three candidates I am strongly considering and a few I am strongly not, and I don't want to pick a side now when there haven't been any debates and the contest not yet fully in s...

I don't agree with Rand Paul on much, but I'd be remiss not to thank him for doing a little battle against the never-ending war against "Al Qaeda" we are fighting with drones.  I put "Al Qaeda" in quotes because it deserves to be.  The entity that attacked us on 9/11 is pretty much out of business.  The other organizations that call themselves Al Qaeda this or that are not Al Qaeda, no more than someone else can call themselves a Bilmes or a Joshua or a Joshua Bilmes and not be me.  And even though I am not in favor of any of these organizations attacking us or for that matter attacking other people, including other Muslims, which they do as or more often as attacking us, I am in favor of the rule of law.  Targeted assassinations against targets determined behind closed doors under a program with no oversight, no accountability, no nothing, with the administration not even willing to entirely preclude carrying out attacks like this as opposed to arrest and t...

I just feel like ranting about a thing or two today: The Keystone Pipeline.  I'm a leftie, you read the blog and you know that, I believe in climate change, I believe in not running the AC 24/7 during the summer or leaving store doors open to hot streets while running the AC at 72 degrees in the summer, I believe in rapid transit over cars.  But I'm not a crazy leftie, I do all those wonderful things and then like to fly in business class to London Book Fair so I can have a good healthy carbon footprint just like everyone else.  The environmentalists shouldn't be fighting the Keystone Pipeline like it is the end of the planet.  Yes, the arguments in favor of the pipeline are almost certainly a lot of hooey with regard to the jobs created.  But stopping the pipeline isn't going to stop anything else.  The oil locked in the Canadian tar sands is coming out no matter what, it is getting to market one way or the other, it's happening.  Did you ever see t...

The world is way too full of post-election pontification as well as pre-election and any other kind of election pontification, I'll add only a few quick thoughts. The Tea Party:  So, yes, the Tea Party did help the Republican wave in the US House and in local legislatures.  The Tea Party also kept Harry Reid in his job by putting some "winning" candidates on the ballot for US Senate.  Without the Tea Party, odds are very good the Republicans would have had both houses of congress in 2010, and likely still today.  The people who think Mitt Romney lost because he wasn't more like all those losing hardcore conservative senate candidates need to think on this. And just to say, more people voted for Democrats for the House than for Republicans, but I don't think we can make a big deal here.  I'm a guy who told people to stop complaining about 2000 because (a) the election was for practical purposes a tie (b) the guy who controlled the tiebreakers won.  We let po...

So it's been an interesting last ten days or so! For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does.  It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous.  But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding.  All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise.  But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice.  And I had power!  Many of my Scrabble friend...

I didn't watch the debate because I was watching Indians, but if I understand this part of it correctly... Mitt Romney said he doesn't have plans for a $5 Trillion tax cut because he intends to find that amount of money elsewhere in the budget so it doesn't raise the deficit, and this cannot be considered a tax cut. He intends to have the government take five trillion dollars from some people to give five trillion dollars to other people Isn't that redistribution?? Yes, Redistribution R E D I S T R I B U T I O N Now, from a Republicsn standpoint maybe not because money people don't pay in taxes is always your money that you get to keep so how can it be redistribution to just let you keep your five trillion dollars. But, if you are one of the people who will lose a tax loophole and pay more of your money in taxes than you are now, won't that look like the government took Five Trillion to redistribute it elsewhere? If you benefit from a government program whether ...

So it's That Time of the Year, that biennial season when you can turn to CSPAN at off-hours or streaming on their website with oodles and oodles of political debates. And it's that time when I am perennially reminded how good the Republican Party is.  Not on ideas or policies, there are very few of those that I agree with, but their messaging is always so much better and so much more consistent.  You watch a handful of debates, you'll see the Republicans trotting out their well-tested talking points.  And you'll see the Democrats -- well, you never know what you'll see the Democrats doing.  Do Democratic strategists watch debates?  Can't they figure out after the first few what the Republican message is and start to get some counterpoints out by the time debate season is into its third or fourth weeks?  Will Democrats ever realize that you can get only so far trying to distance yourself from your party or your President, that one of the great Republican suc...

I thought I'd share with the world an e-mail I sent to the Public Advocate at the NY Times regarding margins of error in polling... Dear Mr. Brisbane: I am getting really tired of articles, like ones earlier this week with a paragraphs pasted below my signature block, that consistently mis-represent the meaning of the margin of error in polling. Every single time a poll shows candidates apart, even in the mid to high single digits, the articles imply that the race is tied, within the margin of error. But that's only half true. The margin of error can just as easily go the other way. Scott Walker could be five points either ahead or behind Tom Barrett in Wisconsin. He could have been tied with Kathleen Falk or could actually have had a landslide twelve point lead over Kathleen Falk. In Virginia, President Obama could be in a very close dead heat with Governor Romney because he has a seven point lead in a poll with a four percent margin of error or he could be ahead of Gove...

So here's the thing with a flat tax, it doesn't actually make filing taxes all that much simpler. Most people already have a pretty simply tax situation. They earn money from their job, which gets reported to the IRS. In fact, for a lot of people, your state and the IRS could just send you a bill based on the information that's given to them on your W2 and 1099 forms. Some states have even tried doing this. Of course, companies like H&R Block spend considerable lobbying dollars to stop this from happening broadly. The complexity in the tax code, lots of it is someplace where it can't be so easily eliminated, which is in defining what income actually is for businesses or for people with more investments and wrinkles in their earning picture. I have a relatively simple business to keep track of, I take money, I send most of it on to clients, but then there are still a lot of rules and will always be a lot of rules for just what amount of the rest of it is an expen...

Here's a Washington Post article from this Saturday where Attorney General Eric Holder is defending the legality of sting operations that are finding terrorist plots emanating from radicalized Muslims in the United States. It's a difficult question. My client Tobias Buckell mentioned another Washington Post article describing how one informant the FBI was using so upset a lot of the people in a mosque that they called the FBI to report him. You read enough of these stories, and it's very clear that the people the FBI is arresting are radicalized, do have intentions on harming us. And at the same time, a lot of their particular plots might not have advanced if the FBI didn't find and encourage and help them. From the legal definition of entrapment, I don't think the entrapment defense works because the intention is there with or without the FBI. At the same time, I don't know if we're doing ourselves a service by having the FBI informers essentially run ...

I'll let the Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein have the last word on the deal President Obama cut with Republican leaders on taxes. His column explains much better than I what Obama maybe shoulda done, why the Democrats in Congress have to take a big hit on blame themselves, and why maybe though I'd wish it weren't so the deal isn't as bad as we professional lefties would like to think. And in his subsequent column which you can find here , Pearlstein goes after one of my favorite targets, the Democratic Senator from Montana Max Baucus. He was one of the only Democrats to support the Bush tax legislation in 2001 (believe you me, I don't need Steven Pearlstein to remind me of that!), and helped stall the health care bill this year with months of pointless negotiations. Now, somebody should have reined him in during that time (Reid, Obama, someone), but he's a poster child for the kind of off-rez stupid behavior that Democrats seem to put u...

"And I’m confident that as we make tough choices about bringing our deficit down, as I engage in a conversation with the American people about the hard choices we’re going to have to make to secure our future and our children’s future and our grandchildren’s future, it will become apparent that we cannot afford to extend those tax cuts any longer." That's a quote from President Obama's statement on Dec. 6 about his deal with Republican legislative leaders to undo The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011 . Wow! And then in his press conference on Dec. 7 to defend the deal, he says (and I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think misquoting) "no I don't think extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the American people think it's a bad idea, but since I haven't been able to persuade Mitch McConnell and John Boehner that it's a bad idea, I have to deal with that reality." Wow, wow wow. The Great Republican Tax Increase of 2011 was agree...

Updated twice, final 4:07 EST. The New York Times Week in Review section reprinted this Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the few comparisons in the TSA debate that I don't find utterly false. In fact, I find it rather funny. In the midst of all of its columnists telling us to take our pats and shut up, their Sunday Outlook section has a column by Jeffrey Rosen that dares to flat-out call the current regime unconstitutional. And Rosen is not a hypocritical Republican, he's not some immature person for Ruth Marcus to yell at, he's a long-time legal affairs writer, a professor at George Washington School of Law, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, often published in the Times as well, check out his GW bio here . Click here to find the 2nd quarter earnings release from Barnes & Noble. Same store sales were down a relatively modest 3.3%, loss was $12.6M, with the expectation that the lion and lamb will lie next to one another and s...

Fact: George W. Bush signed and enthusiastically supported a bill to raise all of our taxes in 2011. Living people, dead people, working people, unemployed people, rich people, poor people. And this bill was supported by, like, every Republican in the US Congress at the time. So why can't the Democrats just start talking about how "my opponent voted for/supported/supports the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. I voted against/was opposed to the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. And in fact, I support the legislation President Obama has introduced to stop the Republican Tax Increase of 2011 and to give every American a tax cut. My opponent doesn't support this bill, he's trying to stop it." If a Democrat is asked about the "Bush tax cuts," why can't he respond "yes, you're asking about the Republican Tax Increase of 2011. My opponent voted for/supported..." Everything I've stated here is true. Even the richest people in the wor...

The NY Times reports in an article by Nina Bernstein that the federal government is now asking people for their papers on the Lake Shore Limited, an Amtrak train that doesn't actually cross or really go particularly near the Canadian border. The questioning is strictly "voluntary" because the government doesn't actually have the right to ask an entire trainful of people for their papers. Though of course not many people are going to refuse to answer questions from an ICE/border patrol officer shining a flashlight in their face, and the officers don't tell you that you've no obligation to answer.  The officers doing this are assigned to a customs station originally set up to handle a ferry across Lake Ontario that hasn't run for some time, yet the station just kept growing and growing. Such authority to do this as can be mustered comes from rules that allow the US to enforce immigration rules within a "reasonable distance" of the border, which is...

Sadly two Hungarian touriststs died in a duck tour accident in Philadelphia this week. That is two more people than have died from succesful islamic terrorism attacks in the in the US in the past 8 years. Yet we live our lives under constant assault from the security state that has developed in the US. I can enter a major league baseball stadium with a factory-sealed water bottle but not with the same bottle in its entirely empty state. I must wait on line and present photo ID to enter midtown office buildings filled with people and companies nobody in the world cares about. Airport security theatre.. Bag checks for the Bryant Park FIlm Festival. I'm not linking to all of my earlier posts, click the Homeland "security" tag to find more. And as it turns out, going on a duck tour in Philadelphia is more dangerous. OK, I'm being a little tiny bit flip here. If or even when there's a successful suicide bomb attack in the NYC subways, that will be a very bad thing...